weather dependent OpenSprinkler Garden irrigation with Netatmo weather station
- This topic has 9 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 5 months ago from
.
I have one to water my terraced house garden OpenSprinkler Irrigation computer installed for weather-dependent control of the Gardena irrigation system.
The OpenSprinkler is installed in the garage and supplies three irrigation zones equipped with Gardena 24V AC valves. It is integrated into my WLAN network via its integrated WLAN adapter and is supplied with power via the associated power supply unit. The valves are installed in a Gardena 2-way valve box Backyard and a 1-way valve box Frontyard. The lawn behind the house is watered with a pop-up square sprinkler and a turbine pop-up sprinkler. Different drip irrigation nozzles are used to water the plants in the beds in front of the house and the flower pots on the terrace behind the house.
The Opensprinkler I have been running 3.1-DC since spring 2019. Before that, I had two years of experience with one OpenSprinkler OSBee collect, but did not want to miss out on the advantages of weather-controlled irrigation.
The three irrigation zones are in that OpenSprinkler Firmware program defined as "Backyard Lawn", "Backyard Flowers" and "Frontyard Flowers".
In my opinion, watering the garden depending on the weather only makes sense if there is access to reliable local weather data. In particular, the amount of precipitation can vary greatly from place to place. For this reason, I integrated my existing Netatmo weather station into the control.
As a weather-specific method for the OpenSprinkler I use the Zimmerman method. I set the base value for the humidity to 65%, all other base values were retained. I think that this corresponds quite well to the average value of the humidity during the Central European gardening period and I have had good experiences with it.
In the current version V2.0.4 of the OpenSprinkler Weather Service, the weather data for the last 24 hours is used to calculate the irrigation value "% Water Level" when the Zimmerman method is selected and the Local Weather Station or Weather Underground is selected. However, this is more of an advantage compared to the classic Zimmerman method, since more current data for temperature, humidity and rainfall flow into the calculation of the irrigation value.
In recent years, payment systems have been increasingly introduced by weather service providers and cloud services and by the OpenSprinkler The team also carried out a number of updates in this regard.
In order to become a little more independent of this, I have the OpenSprinkler Weather Service installed on a Raspberry Pi along with the open source weather software WeeWx. WeeWx establishes the connection to the Netatmo weather station and also allows a graphical representation of the weather data. Also became the OpenSprinkler Firmware 2.1.9(7) recompiled by me and the periodic polling of the Weather Service reset from 6 hours to one hour. In my opinion, this is the only way to obtain current data for irrigation in the early hours of the morning. The local Raspberry Pi installation of the Weather Service also means that there are no additional costs for this OpenSprinkler team due to the increased polling frequency.
To avoid watering when it rains, a Kenko M152 rain sensor was also installed and with the OpenSprinkler Sensor input S1 connected. The IFTTT cloud service can no longer be used for rain warnings, as the guaranteed response time in the non-paid version can be up to 1 hour.
I only use IFTTT for Google Calendar logging of the total rain amount determined by Weather Underground for the previous day and the OpenSprinkler activities used.In recent years, the lawn, flowers and bushes have been watered every two days at 7:00 a.m. For this year, the water supply for the potted plants on the terrace is to be improved, since on hot days they obviously have to be watered more often than every two days.
The lawn is now watered every two days shortly after sunrise. The flowers and shrubs are watered daily at 18 p.m. A 00% base value of 100 minutes is specified for the lawn and a 30% base value of 100 minutes for the flowers and shrubs. Here I am still optimizing and will possibly increase the lawn watering to three days with a 15% base value of 100 minutes.
It is also important for me to check the functioning of the irrigation system when travelling. In addition to controlling the OpenSprinkler familiar with the OpenSprinkler App is also a power reset of the hard error case OpenSprinklers possible via a radio-controlled socket that can be controlled remotely using the Fritz!Box.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.